Product Description

This book has been created as a companion to our Adobe Captivate 4: The Essentials book. The goal of the "Essentials" book is to get you up and running using Adobe Captivate 4 as quickly as possible. After completing that book, which tips the scales at over 200 pages, you will have an excellent grasp of how to both record and produce eLearning lessons using Adobe Captivate 4. However, there is a ton of information that just didn't fit into that book.

"Adobe Captivate 4: Beyond the Essentials" picks up where the "Essentials" book left off. You will quickly learn Captivate's higher-end functionality while improving your production skills via project templates, design templates, advanced actions and scripts. You will learn to collaborate with team members via Captivates' powerful commenting features. You'll enhance your users experience via variables that will make it seem like each eLearning lesson you produce has been customized for and is talking directly to your customer.

There are lessons in this book about the PowerPoint linking and import workflow, importing Captivate project assets into other projects, branching, question pools, creating accessible projects, commenting, image editing, Photoshop layers, variables, widgets, creating custom buttons, project and design templates, advanced actions and, last but not least, uploading content into an LMS (and creating a manifest file).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #92198 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-01
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 202 pages

About the Author
Kevin A. Siegel is the founder and president of IconLogic, Inc. He has written more than 100 step-by-step computer training books, including Essentials of Adobe Captivate 4, Essentials of Adobe Captivate 3, Essentials of Adobe Captivate 2, Essentials of Macromedia Captivate, Essentials of RoboDemo 5, Essentials of RoboDemo 4, Essentials of RoboDemo 3, Essentials of Adobe RoboHelp 8 HTML, Essentials of Adobe RoboHelp 7 HTML, Essentials of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, QuarkXPress 8: The Basics, QuarkXPress 8: Beyond the Basics, Essentials of QuarkXPress 7, Accelerated QuarkXPress 6 and Essentials of Adobe InDesign CS3.

Kevin spent five years in the U.S. Coast Guard as an award-winning photojournalist and has more than 23 years experience as a print publisher and technical writer. He is a certified technical trainer, has been a classroom instructor for more than 16 years and is a frequent speaker at trade shows and conventions. Kevin holds multiple certifications from companies such as Adobe and the CompTIA.

Customer Reviews

Very helpful
I bought this book after completing the first book in the series, and I recommend the Essentials book first unless you are already familiar with Captivate. This book was even more helpful than the first. I like the format of the lessons and the practice exercises on the included CD are very good.

Need to know why you are performing a task
Having never used Captivate before, I went through the Essentials book first. I found that the book, along with this Beyond the Essentials, is a little too much 'cookbook' style. Meaning, the user is directed to choose, select, add, click, type, but there is not often enough explanation as to what this will produce. For example, the first student activity for creating a user variable contains the steps to create a variable and save it, but there is no explanation as to what this variable will do. So often I found myself following instructions to click, choose, etc., with no idea as to what this was going to produce.

However, there are very few books on Captivate out there, and this one was helpful to have. I would prefer more information about why I am doing something, rather than waiting until I've done all the steps then previewing the project to see it do something.